AI Engineer – Startups & Partnerships

Citi; Belfast City District; Hybrid; GBP 80,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work

Private medical care

Life insurance

Annual bonus

Pension plan

Parental leave

Learning resources

Employee discounts

Job summary

Citi Belfast is seeking an AI Engineer on the Startups & Partnerships team to build, test, and ship real AI applications across Citi’s lines of business. You’ll work directly with stakeholders, evaluate new models from top AI labs, and move at startup speed inside a global institution.

You’ll gain rare exposure to business requirements, hands-on model evaluation, and end-to-end delivery from prototype to production while collaborating across teams at Citi.

Qualifications

• Full-stack engineer with applied AI/LLM experience; not a data science/ML research role.
• Proven experience shipping AI applications, pipelines, and workflows in production.
• Hands-on proficiency with LLMs, prompt engineering, and agentic frameworks/tools.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals across backend, API, and frontend tooling.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management with business leaders.
• Quick learner of new AI tools and platforms as the landscape evolves.
• Comfort operating in a large, regulated global institution with startup speed.
• Desirable: experience with startups/venture teams or tech scouting.
• Desirable: familiarity with vector DBs, RAG, or knowledge-graph retrieval.
• Desirable: containerization and cloud-native deployment for AI services.
• Desirable: experience in financial services or banking contexts.
• Desirable: ability to present technical concepts to non-technical audiences.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship AI applications and workflows that solve real business problems.
• Evaluate emerging AI tech through structured PoCs and sandbox bake-offs.
• Prototype ideas quickly from concept to working demo in days.
• Integrate LLMs and agentic systems with APIs and data pipelines.
• Deliver PoCs into production with governance and platform teams.
• Translate technical work into clear, business-focused narratives.

Skills

Full-stack engineering

Applied AI/LLM

LLMs & prompt engineering

LangChain / LlamaIndex

API integrations

Docker / Kubernetes

Stakeholder communication

Learning fast

Startup mindset

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

LangChain

Job description

About the Team

The Startups & Partnerships team is the forward scout of the Citi's Head of AI Organization. Our mandate: identify, evaluate, and rapidly onboard the emerging technologies that will define Citi's next chapter with Artificial Intelligence as our number one strategic priority right now. We don't sit in a lab waiting for ideas to trickle in. We move across every line of business at Citi, sit down directly with business stakeholders and clients, and go toe-to-toe with the sharpest startups and frontier AI labs in the market. We run fast, we run lean, and we run with the full weight of a global institution behind us.

Role

As an AI Engineer on the Startups & Partnerships team, you will be at the tip of the spear for Citi's AI strategy - building, testing, and shipping real applications that touch real business problems across the bank, not writing whitepapers about them from the sidelines.

You'll get a level of exposure that's rare in a Tier-1 global bank: direct access to business requirements, hands-on evaluation of the newest models and platforms from the industry's leading AI labs, and the mandate to move at startup speed inside an institution operating at global scale. If you want to build things that matter, get them in front of real users fast, and shape how one of the world's largest financial institutions adopts AI - this is the seat.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and ship AI applications - architect, develop, and deploy production-grade AI-powered tools, pipelines, and workflows that solve real business problems across Citi's lines of business.


• Evaluate emerging AI technology - run structured proof-of-concepts and sandbox "bake-offs" to rapidly assess new models, platforms, and startup tools (LLMs, agentic frameworks, orchestration layers) for real-world fit.


• Prototype at speed - turn a business idea into a working demo in days, not quarters, and iterate quickly based on stakeholder feedback.


• Integrate across the stack - connect LLMs and agentic systems to enterprise APIs, data pipelines, and lightweight front-end or tooling layers to deliver end-to-end working solutions.


• Deliver PoCs into production pathways - work with governance, risk, and platform teams to shepherd validated solutions from prototype toward scaled deployment.


• Communicate impact - translate technical work into clear, compelling narratives for senior business and technology stakeholders.

Skills & Experience

• A full-stack engineer with applied AI/LLM experience - this is explicitly not a data science or ML research role. We need builders, not modelers.


• Proven experience building and shipping AI applications, pipelines, and workflows in live, production environments - not just notebooks and academic experiments.


• Hands-on proficiency with Large Language Models (LLMs), prompt engineering, and agentic frameworks and orchestration tools (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, or similar).


• Strong software engineering fundamentals - comfortable working across the stack, from backend services and API integrations to lightweight front-end or internal tooling layers.


• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills - you can work directly with business leaders and clients, not just other engineers.


• A track record of learning and adopting new tools and platforms quickly as the AI landscape evolves.


• Comfort operating in a large, regulated, global institution while bringing a startup-speed mentality to your work.


• Experience working directly with startups, venture teams, or technology scouting functions. (Desirable)


• Familiarity with vector databases, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or knowledge graph-based retrieval. (Desirable)


• Experience with containerization and cloud-native deployment (Docker, Kubernetes) for AI services. (Desirable)


• Prior exposure to financial services, banking, or other highly regulated industries. (Desirable)


• Experience presenting technical concepts to non-technical, senior business audiences. (Desirable)

What we’ll provide you

By joining Citi Belfast, you will not only be part of a business casual workplace with a hybrid working model (up to 2 days working at home per week), but also receive a competitive base salary (which is annually reviewed), and enjoy a whole host of additional benefits such as:

• 27 days annual leave (plus bank holidays)


• A discretional annual performance related bonus


• Private Medical Care & Life Insurance


• Employee Assistance Program


• Pension Plan


• Paid Parental Leave


• Special discounts for employees, family, and friends


• Access to an array of learning and development resources

Visit our Global Benefits page to learn more.

Job Family Group

Technology

Job Family

Applications Development

Time Type

Full time

Most Relevant Skills

Please see the requirements listed above.

Other Relevant Skills

For complementary skills, please see above and/or contact the recruiter.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Citi is an equal opportunity employer, and qualified candidates will receive consideration without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other characteristic protected by law.

If you are a person with a disability and need a reasonable accommodation to use our search tools and/or apply for a career opportunity review Accessibility at Citi.

View Citi’s EEO Policy Statement and the Know Your Rights poster.